Wednesday, October 02, 2013

News---Plantation Quest: Re-enactor Sleeps In The Beds of The Slaves

One Man's Epic Quest To Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United States: Joseph McGill, A Descendant of Slaves, Has Devoted His Life To Ensuring The Preservation Of These Historic Sites, Tony Horwitz, Smithsonian Magazine, October, 2013.

At a bygone plantation in coastal Georgia, Joseph McGill Jr. creaks open a
door to inspect his quarters for the night. He enters a cramped cell with an
ancient fireplace and bare walls mortared with oyster shell. There is no
furniture, electricity or plumbing.“I was expecting a dirt floor, so this is nice,” McGill says, lying down to
sample the hard pine planks. “Might get a decent sleep tonight.”

Some travelers dream of five-star hotels, others of visiting seven
continents. McGill’s mission: to sleep in every former slave dwelling still
standing in the United States. Tonight’s stay, in a cabin on Georgia’s Ossabaw
Island, will be his 41st such lodging. McGill is 52, with a desk job and family, and isn’t fond of sleeping rough. A
descendant of slaves, he also recognizes that re-inhabiting places of bondage
“seems strange and upsetting to some people.” But he embraces the discomfort,
both physical and psychological, because he wants to save slave dwellings and
the history they hold before it’s too late. “Americans tend to focus on the ‘big house,’ the mansion and gardens, and
neglect the buildings out back,” he says. “If we lose slave dwellings, it’s that
much easier to forget the slaves themselves.”

A century ago, the whitewashed cabins of former slaves remained as ubiquitous
a feature of the Southern landscape as Baptist churches or Confederate
monuments. Many of these dwellings were still inhabited by the families of the
four million African-Americans who had gained freedom in the Civil War. But as
blacks migrated en masse from the South in the 20th century, former slave
quarters—most of which were cheaply built from wood—quickly decayed or were torn
down. Others were repurposed as toolsheds, garages or guest cottages. Of those
that remain, many are now endangered by neglect, and by suburban and resort
development in areas like the Georgia and Carolina Low Country, a lush region
that once had the densest concentration of plantations and enslaved people in
the South.

McGill has witnessed this transformation firsthand as a native South
Carolinian who works for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in
Charleston. But it wasn’t his day job that led him to sleep in endangered slave
cabins. Rather, it was his weekends as a Civil War re-enactor, wearing the
uniform of the 54th Massachusetts, the black unit featured in the movie
Glory. Donning a period uniform and camping out, often at antebellum
sites, “made the history come alive for me,” he says. Re-enacting the 54th has
also drawn public attention to the pivotal role of black soldiers in the Civil
War. So in 2010, when Magnolia Plantation near Charleston sought to publicize
restoration of its neglected slave cabins, McGill proposed sleeping in one of
them.

“I was a little spooked,” he says of his overnight stay. “I kept getting up
hearing noises. It was just the wind blowing limbs against the cabin.” His
simple bedroll, laid on the hard floor, also didn’t make for a comfortable
night. But the sleepover succeeded in drawing media attention to the slave
cabins, which have since been opened to the public. So McGill began compiling a
list of other such structures and seeking out their owners, to ask if he could
sleep in them.